The medieval art of self-correction

Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey Into the Medieval Mind, Peter Jones, Hutchinson Heinemann, £20

In the early years of the 11th century, a monk named Eilmer jumped from the top of a Wiltshire tower. Assisted by wings fitted to his hands and feet, he caught a breeze, which kept him airborne for some 200 metres – at least twice the distance of the Wright brothers’ first flight – before he fell to the ground, breaking both of his legs. The accident left him permanently disabled, but he reportedly still believed that he could have gone further if only he had thought to wear a tail.

Today, Eilmer seems like an admirable figure, both as a pioneering inventor (albeit one who should have had a little less faith in his own creations) and as a man brave enough to risk his life for science. But his fellow monks – including William of Malmesbury, who recorded the story, which he probably heard first-hand from the elderly Eilmer, a century later – took a rather different view. They thought that this foolish monk was guilty of the sin of pride. 

According to the medieval historian Peter Jones, their judgement reflects a world preoccupied by the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. This septet emerged in the early days of the Christian church, and came to new prominence with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Over the next three centuries, they were discussed not only in thousands of pastoral treatises (written to help medieval priests understand human nature, and thus to care for their flocks), but also in literary works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the pilgrim can enter Paradise only once he has learnt to recognise all seven of the sins within himself. 

Medieval understandings of the deadly sins were, Jones argues, very different to our own. While we take pride in our achievements and are happy to joke about our tendency towards gluttony or sloth, for our forebears these behaviours amounted to serious moral failings. Pride was the worst of all, as illustrated by the cautionary tales of Lucifer (the first among the angels, whose vanity led him into rebellion against God), and of Simon Magus, a Roman magician who set himself up as a rival to St Peter. As well as claiming that he could levitate and raise the dead, he also staged his own resurrection, convincing the Emperor Nero to erect a statue ‘To Simon, The Holy God’. 

To avoid following in their footsteps, medieval Christians read works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride, which outlined every stage from the first stirrings, which typically took the form of a desire to improve one’s circumstances, to the more serious problems of rebellion (a refusal to live alongside others in any kind of community) and habitual sin.

For Jones, engaging with the Seven Deadly Sins helps us to better understand the Middle Ages, though some of the stories he uncovers in this very readable book now feel deeply bizarre. Highlights of the chapter on lust include the eroticised piety of mystics such as Hadewijch (who was expelled from her Belgian beguinage after claiming that Jesus came to her at night and ‘satisfied [her] to the utmost satiation’), along with filthy fabliaux such as St Martin’s Wishes, in which a peasant couple squander four wishes acquiring and then removing extra genitals. 

Medieval concerns about gluttony feel more familiar, though our definitions, which focus on overeating, are considerably narrower than the one offered by Thomas Aquinas, which encompassed eating ‘hastily, sumptuously, too much, greedily [or] daintily.’ Consequently, Henry I, who was killed by a surfeit of lampreys, was guilty not only of eating too much, but of fixating on his favourite food. Medieval confessors, meanwhile, were urged to ask penitents: ‘Do you make a great attempt to salt and prepare foods with passion and delight?’ and ‘Are you sometimes angry when they are not prepared in the optimum way?’ 

Refusing food could also be a problem: women such as Catherine of Siena, who subsisted on water and herbs (alongside ‘exquisite’ pus from the sores of the hospital patients she tended) were widely criticised, with some wondering if she was trying to outdo Jesus, who was apparently content to eat a conventional diet. The ideal attitude was the one cultivated by St Francis of Assisi, who would take whatever he was given – whether a plain bowl of porridge or a fine dish of ‘crabcakes, honey, and freshly-picked grapes’. 

This paragon of virtue also renounced his worldly possessions to live a life of absolute poverty, thus avoiding the sin of avarice – which, thanks to the 13th-century commercial revolution and the relative plenty of the post-Black Death world, became a considerably more accessible sin in the later Middle Ages. Though most people’s homes were sparsely furnished by modern standards, post-mortem inventories show a steady increase in material wealth. When Jaume Suau, a Valencian textile worker and former slave, died in the early 15th century, he owned not only the needles and thread which were the tools of his trade, but also several painted benches and chests, a selection of tableware, some fashionable clothes (including a black doublet with red sleeves, and a white silk belt) and a book of Psalms. 

That even a relatively humble craftsman could own such luxuries might lead a cynic to conclude that only the exceptionally pious took the deadly sins seriously – especially in light of a 14th-century moral dictionary’s convenient redefinition of avarice as a state of wanting things that are not ‘necessary for your life, according to its conditions’. But Jones disagrees, building a compelling case that the seven deadly sins fuelled a medieval appetite for self-improvement just as great as our own. And, since our forebears shared many of our concerns, engaging with their strategies might help us to find medieval solutions for modern problems.

Anger, for example, was as much of an issue in the Middle Ages as it is today, with medieval people aspiring to emulate Judith (a popular symbol of righteous anger due to her cool-headed execution of the tyrannical Holofernes), but fearing they had more in common with Henry II. He suffered from terrible temper tantrums and an unfortunate tendency towards blasphemia, a particularly problematic form of anger which involved ‘maliciously striking out at something or someone holy’ – such as Thomas Becket. 

Many sought to manage their emotions using psychological techniques, such as focusing on compassion to fortify the heart, though the belief that anger could arise from an excess of yellow bile also raised the possibility of medical solutions. Some specialists recommended the use of theriac, a popular opium-based cure-all. And the Montpellier-based physician Arnaud de Vilanova (d. 1311) developed a special wine, made from the roots of oxtongue, which supposedly cured a Parisian woman whose furious ravings had led to her being tied up. 

Medieval descriptions of sloth (a state in which, according to the German Benedictine Conrad of Hirsau, ‘all good things now leave you bored’) suggest that medieval people also wrestled with what we would call depression. For some, this was triggered by a bereavement: Juana of Castile’s excessive grief for her husband Philip of Burgundy left her so ‘confused and brainless’ that she was confined to a convent for the rest of her life, though Jones suspects her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, of exaggerating her madness to get his hands on her inheritance.

Others, aided by a ‘strong mountain’ – defined by the preacher William Peraldus as a person, idea or activity that supports and comforts a sufferer, so that they might learn to love the world again – eventually found a path to recovery. For the Norfolk mystic Margery Kempe, it was her deep bond with Jesus that enabled her to display incredible fortitude in the face of many tragedies, including the death of her adult son. 

Reflecting on the experiences of these medieval mourners, Jones writes movingly of his father’s death, and throughout Self-Help from the Middle Ages he includes autobiographical asides which highlight the parallels between medieval and modern experiences. Understandably, his recollections of his own brushes with the deadly sins (drawn mostly from a period spent teaching in Siberia, where he taught the course which inspired this book) are rather tame: he recounts getting angry in a departmental meeting, getting drunk on a train to Omsk, and envying colleagues who had managed to secure permanent posts in warmer climes. 

The passages in which he takes us into archives and museums, showing us their treasures through a medievalist’s eyes, are more effective. In New York, a researcher-turned-security guard introduces him to the Fournier Register, a record of the Inquisition’s activities in early 14th-century France. Within its pages, he meets the proud and lustful heretic Guillaume Bélibaste. In Barcelona, a close encounter with the Holy Grail helps him to understand medieval attempts to ‘rise towards truth through material things’, by seeking their spiritual meaning.

In Padua, he visits the Arena Chapel, home to some of Giotto’s greatest paintings, including a striking image of Envy personified. Standing in flames, with a poisonous snake slithering out of her mouth to bite her on the face, this monstrous woman has tiny eyes (because envy makes her wilfully blind), large ears (ready to catch rumours and insults with which to harm those she envies) and prominent horns (an uncomfortably antisemitic allusion to the supposed ‘envy of the Jews’). It’s a striking image, at once a reminder of how much we share with our distant ancestors – and just how different they were.